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29 April 2011 | Posted in experimental, projects, video A little experiment using the camera's built-in picture styles. For this video I created a very contrasty black & white picture style, instead of converting to black & white in post. As mentioned in an earlier blog post, this keeps things kind of raw and spontaneous and very much affects the way you shoot.
Another experiment was the "rasterized" effect you see in certain shots. This was created by exporting some of the footage to my iPhone, and subsequently filming those clips playing back on the iPhone screen. However, instead of just filming the screen, I filmed though a second lens (a Nikon 50 f/1.4 in this case) that was sitting on top of the iPhone. This produced an interesting kind of macro image, where the individual pixels of the iPhone are visible. Below is a image of the setup.
I did this with a normal version of the footage, but also with a "negative" version, where white became black and black became white. The filming of the iPhone was not done with the monochrome picture style, but in color. Why would I do that when the footage itself is in black & white? We'll get to that in a minute...
By overlaying the positive or negative original footage with the positive or negative version that was been recorded from the iPhone screen and playing around with the blend modes in Final Cut Pro, it's now possible to create all sorts of weird effects. Since one of the tracks has color information in it, you can actually get some color in the end result, because of the way the images are blended.
The finishing touches consisted of adding some graphics (made in Keynote) and a little sound design. For the soundtrack I cut up the song Exodus by Noisia, and mixed it up a little in a way that seemed to work for the different parts of the video.
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